Battle of the b(r)ands: which music service earns your monthly allowance?

We pit Spotify and Rdio in a battle of features, functionality, and design.

Subscription music services have finally hit the big time. Gone are the days of paying $15 a month to sift through a sparse collection of a few thousand songs on Rhapsody or some other service.

It's all thanks to one element: the ever-present cloud. Subscriptions became successful when they went from a temporary vector of content access to tools of curation. You're not paying for material; you're paying to lay your own order to the teeming millions of songs on offer. To borrow a phrase from Clueless, you're paying to give yourself a "sense of control in a world filled with chaos."

The best music services are now persistent on many fronts and playable through a number of devices. Make a playlist on your computer and immediately listen to it on your smartphone; favorite a song on your tablet and it joins the relevant hall of fame on your other two gadgets. And not only is your own activity inherently portable, but so is that of friends and people you follow on these services. Profiles, playlists, collections, and collaborations of your influencers and fans are only a couple of taps away on any given device.

Two heavy hitters have emerged in the landscape: Spotify, a Swedish streaming startup, and Rdio, a music subscription service created by the founders of Skype. While they're not the only players in the game, they've gained the most traction—Spotify with its four years in service and a highly accessible free tier, and Rdio with its clean interface and sizable launch catalog. Both services charge $10 for premium monthly service, which includes ad-free listening and access to the account from up to three mobile devices. Additionally, both offer offline playback, social integration, and wide device support. For those reasons, we're focusing on those two.

It would hardly be financially straining for anyone to try out each service, even simultaneously (take it easy, Donald Trump). But we find we're not really using a service until we're knee-deep in playlists, followers, and friends. By the time we really get how it works, we're invested, if not quite locked in entirely. This kind of situation isn't optimal for consumers. It not only prevents them from making honest comparisons, but it also keeps them from moving freely between services when one that better meets their needs emerges. Witness the recent past: Google Plus versus Facebook, iOS versus Android versus Windows Phone, Windows versus OS X versus Linux.

Here we compare Rdio and Spotify from every conceivable angle, with the goal of helping someone who has not yet materially or financially committed to either one (or, to a lesser extent, someone who is prepared to make the necessary sacrifices to switch). In a few thousand words, any music lover should be able to choose between them. Get out your ten dollars; it's decision-making time.

Social integration

As more of my friends join and use Spotify, the social stream that occupies half of the right side has become the most entertaining part of the program. One person to ironically bring the Spice Girls back, one to ground you with incessant Bob Dylan and Rolling Stones, another to alienate you with one indie band after another, a rap aficionado here, a dubstep fanatic there. And everyone is always dipping back into the new Mumford and Sons for good measure.

Enlarge/ Rdio allows a couple more options for social integration but doesn't require them.

Enlarge/ Spotify's social bar on the right is automatically populated with friends; favorites go in the top right box.

We enjoy the social feed because it lets us see trends. Usually everyone in your social feed is doing their own thing, but when an artist, or even a track, starts to spread to more than one person, it's kind of exciting to see. There's a special kind of validation you feel when a Facebook friend you barely know listens to a song you just listened to. No, I do not ever accept this to be a coincidence. Yes, this may be the only reason anyone is using Spotify—sitting, watching, waiting for this to happen, for that tiny moment of validation.

The social feed only goes a set number of actions back in time, so your read on the state of your friends' listening habits is fleeting. You can favorite certain friends so that their most recent listen is always pinned next to their name in a separate window. The social feed also lets you see when your friends "stars" a song or adds it to one of their published playlists.

Enlarge/ Rdio mercifully will not display playlists without enough songs, for those of us who need to secretly listen to certain songs on repeat all day.

As much fun as it is to see what your friends are doing, I find the higher purpose of the social feed (and favorites) is discovery. My own musical horizons have been vastly expanded since I started really digging into Spotify. The only downside is, to avoid being creepy, I can't satiate my pangs of curiosity by listening to a new song I see in the social feed right away. Instead, I squirrel it away to a "to do" playlist so I can listen when I'm certain that friend won't see me aping their good taste.

One issue with Spotify's social stuff is that it's driven entirely by Facebook. If you fully embrace The Social Network with your entire being and happily connect every service with your account, you'll have no problems with this (privacy- or other-wise). If you're wary about how Facebook tends to be a bit grabby with personal data, this connection is a potential concern.

A secondary issue with the Facebook-centricity is that if you are not someone's Facebook friend, you may have very little to do with that person's activity. Discoverability is very low for people who aren't your Facebook friends, if they aren't some famous person whose playlists are featured on the "What's New" page (see: Sean Parker and Billboard, as in the Billboard Hot 100).

Spotify removed the ability to create accounts without tying them to Facebook for a period of time, and recently added it back. But the app makes it difficult to find someone who isn't your Facebook friend anyway. One way is to search for one of their (publicly available) playlists, which allows you to pull up their profile and then subscribe to them or add them to your favorites, or search using the modifiers "spotify:user:" (as in "spotify:user:[username here]").

The final issue with Facebook integration: when one of your dearest Facebook friends is polluting your social feed with one musical travesty after another, it can put a damper on the magic of the whole thing. You can't hide or unfollow people inside the social feed, which is strange, considering that inside Facebook you can friend someone, hide all of their updates, and forget they're even alive.

Spotify seems to aim for all of your curation to happen through favorites, and devil take the social feed if your friends aren't musically discerning. If they're always raining on an otherwise happening social feed experience, there is the drastic option of unfriending them. But when a music application is burning your social bridges, it's probably time to take a hard look at your priorities.

Rdio also integrates with Facebook, but it doesn't automatically show you your friends' musical selections. Instead, you have to choose to pull in friends from Facebook, Twitter, or Last.fm, or can find people to monitor by searching for them and then clicking a button in their profile. Following someone, roughly the equivalent of favoriting them on Spotify, will send them a notification that they're being followed. It is a bit creepy (Spotify gives no indication when you've been favorited by someone else).

Once someone is part of your network, their profile picture and the most recent song they've listened to appears in the top corner of the window. Unlike Spotify, there's no social feed for the past, only the present. Anyone you follow who doesn't currently have a version of the app open is listed in a separate "offline" list.

Rdio's real advantage comes with its "who to follow" tab, which suggests a number of popular accounts from media entities like Team Coco or Paper Magazine to musical groups like Of Montreal or Dirty Ghosts. Unlike Spotify, you can see the complete listening history of a follow-able person—again, a bit revealing, but this is what you sign up for if you choose to have a public account. Rdio accounts appear to be public by default, but you can set it to "protected" so that you have to approve new followers before they have access to your entire profile and history.

On this count, Spotify is less revealing. In your profile, your top artists are shown in a bar along the top and your published playlists underneath (a playlist of your top 10 tracks automatically display here). There is no way to view anyone's entire recent listening history outside of what's in the short social feed.

While the entire history of someone's recent listens given on Rdio is certainly informative, it doesn't give me a lot of control over what other people see, and it has the most potential to be, well, embarrassing. I'd love to be able to turn that display off entirely.

But Spotify isn't entirely out to make me look good either. Spotify has an option that Rdio doesn't, called Private Session. This allows you to remain online and listen to music that will not display to those who'd normally see your activity in the social feed. But one disconcerting finding I've made is that the music you listen to while in a private session will continue to inform your favorite artists and top tracks in your profile. That's the story of how I ended up with my number one favorite track as the "pink noise" I played while sleeping for a few nights in a row.

If you let tracks sync to Facebook from either Spotify or Rdio, they both display like this.

Like with Spotify, Rdio allows you to create playlists that can be public or private, collaborative or not, and private playlists can be shared with a link. If you let the apps display your musical travels to Facebook, they both display the same way: a small box on your timeline links the song and artist you "are listening" to if a session is in progress, or the last song you listened to if you're not currently DJing.

The lesson here is to never let the last song of a Spotify or Rdio session be "Call Me Maybe" by Carly Rae Jepsen. Go out with a bang, on a savvier note. Anything by Led Zeppelin would be ideal, but the band doesn't allow its catalog to be on either service. Absent that, well, no one seems to have a problem with Mumford and Sons. (If live-streaming your listens to Facebook is too much pressure, as it is for most of us, you can turn this off in settings for both services.)

One element Rdio includes that Spotify can't match in any capacity is the ability for users to review music within the app. This doesn't really integrate into artist or album pages, but when you visit a friend's profile, you can view any reviews they have made. It's a little-used feature among those I follow, but it could be useful for personal record-keeping (why you liked a particular record or what kind of ambience it brings). Or, at the very least, here's your chance for a many-worded apologia on the boy-band wonder One Direction.

It's got a way better catalog than Rdia, Spotify, or any of the rest. The interface isn't as nice, but there are too many gaping holes in the services' catalogs; when I was playing with Spotify earlier this year, they lacked any Metallica whatsoever, which is an odd thing to lack.

(And yes, I realize it's probably not their fault; still, it's a problem with the service, whatever the origin.)

Google Music. Even though it doesn't hold all of my music, it holds enough for me to listen and not worry about repeating the same songs. If they ever start to charge I'll have to see what the fee would be and what you get with it.

I use Zune/xBox music pass. Works great with my Zune HD, Lumia 920, and my desktop computers.All my purchased music is backed-up to Google Play (which I can stream on my Android tablet and desktop computers) and home server.I also buy music from Amazon, so I use the Amazon Cloud Player as well.Kids get stuff from iTunes. The new iTunes client is actually quite nice.

I still buy CDs when sound quality really matters, on well-mastered recordings.

I wish providers would move away from MP3 and offer a modern format.(not a big iTunes fan, though)

Not to fuel the debate about DNR, but gosh its annoying. Looking for some of my favorite recordings to be remastered one of these days!

It's got a way better catalog than Rdia, Spotify, or any of the rest. The interface isn't as nice, but there are too many gaping holes in the services' catalogs; when I was playing with Spotify earlier this year, they lacked any Metallica whatsoever, which is an odd thing to lack.

(And yes, I realize it's probably not their fault; still, it's a problem with the service, whatever the origin.)

For me all services lack a lot of music. I know that might sound hipsterish (or something), but it's the way it is.

I used spotify free when it first came (and you needed invitations), later Premium, now I don't listen to to music so much.

Don't really listen to music, much less pay for it, anymore. Nowadays if I'm working around the house, yard, or garage, I stream NPR radio programs, The Naked Scientists, Car Talk, or other dialog related podcasts.

I really like Slacker Radio. $10 a month and I can play whole albums and make playlists on my phone and precache stations so I can play them later even with no 3G reception. For a mobile user, Slacker is by far superior to any other service I have tried, both in quality and availability of music and app features.

I use Spotify and I love the fact you can simply listen to your playlists offline (not the same offline playlists on other devices is also a plus).

I really try to not care about the social part of it though. I guess you can use it to discover new artists but I know people with different taste and I don't really care if they listen to justin bieber all day ^^

Editor Moonshark says:

Thanks for pointing this out. We spoke with Spotify as recently as Sunday, and they told us it was no longer possible. We're not sure what's up with that, but we've corrected the article to note that you can setup an account right now without Facebook.

MOG for one reason: car integration. I was a (mostly) happy Spotify customer, but when I got my new car, I discovered that it is able to interface directly with the MOG app running on my phone. This lets me browse, search, view playlists, etc. on my navigation screen instead of on the phone. While I'm somewhat dubious about claiming that it's safer to use while driving, it does make it easier to find a song or artist while I'm sitting at a red light without worrying that I'm going to miss the light change while I'm scrolling on my phone. Between this integration and the standard music library integration and Bluetooth MAP, I find almost never have to touch (or at least look) at my phone.

One thing that I didn't see covered (admittedly, I didn't read the entire article since I'm already familiar with both services) was the streaming quality. Spotify does cheap out on the format and just use mp3, which, compared to some other formats, can be a little more taxing on mobile data plans.

One thing I'd like to know, though, is why only two services? I know it's a big playing field and it's not feasible to cover EVERYBODY, but it seems like a little bit of a stretch to call it "Battle of the B(r)ands" when you're only looking at two players in a very broad field.

Don't really listen to music, much less pay for it, anymore. Nowadays if I'm working around the house, yard, or garage, I stream NPR radio programs, The Naked Scientists, Car Talk, or other dialog related podcasts.

Not trying to flame, but is this really relevant to a post relating to streaming music recommendations? Obviously everyone has their own preferences and if yours don't include music, then that's fine, but it doesn't seem terribly helpful.

Music Unlimited since it was $12 for a whole year(And still is if you have PS+) + a 60 day trial. Spotify doesn't work in Canada and Rdio didn't seem much better than MU when I tried it. Plus it works on Playstation stuff too which is nice.

DI.fm Premium for daily streaming, and MP3 downloads for any music I like enough to want to keep.

Agreed. Digitally Imported (and Sky.fm, since you get that with your $5/month as well for when you want something other than eurodance/house/techno of various flavors; and they can be accessed on your computer and any devices you might have, not just three) is a far better deal. Especially since there is, blessedly, NO social network integration (yes, social network integration is a definite turn-off as it provides the user nothing beyond another service harvesting their data).

The only real problem is their Android apps are laid out for phones.

EDIT: Oh, and it helps that Spotify isn't available in Canada. Plus I've heard that, like Netflix, Rdio's catalogue for Canada is, at best,1/4th of what can be accessed down in the States.

I have been a MOG user for quite a while. I was lured in by 320 kbps encoding at their cheaper tier. However I'm pretty certain I'm going to switch to spotify since I use it about 80% of the time. I'd say my top 3 requirements for a streaming service are: music availability, sound quality, and application quality. MOG has some labels and some back catalog that I really value that Spotify doesn't. MOG also can natively stream to airport express devices (I don't know if Spotify can). MOG does have much better "staff recommended and new" albums on their splash screen.

But OTOH, the Spotify app is really good and really fast (I can't stress this enough) with a good social feature. I also feel there's potential with their open API and the apps you can install. After I manually copy all of my playlists to spotify, I'm ready to say goodbye to MOG.

For an article that claims to cover cover both services from "every conceivable angle" you managed to miss covering the one issue that caused me to abandon Pandora a year or two ago. One of the main things I used it for was to discover new artists; the narrowness of selections in the radio stations it created meant I could create a station seeded on a single song/artist and get a dozenish artists with a fairly similar sound. Working this way I was able to progressively explore a number of metal sub-genre's I never heard of before because none of the bands in them was high enough profile to get anything approaching mainstream coverage. Then they changed their algorithms and it didn't matter how obscure of an indie band I used; Pandora would create a station heavily dominated by the best known mainstream bands. I never heard anything new anymore; and I can listen to bands like Metallica, Motley Crue, or the Scorpions with my local music collection and have more freedom over my playlist and not have to click I'm Still Listening throughout the day to keep the tunes coming.

While you mentioned not being impressed with the quality of their radio station features there wasn't anything about how diverse their selections were.

I'm a Spotify Premium member. Though I have a large collection of purchased and ripped music, I just don't want to manage the storage and backup of a collection anymore. I'm willing to look past the disadvantages for now (mainly holes in the catalog) to support the concept of a cloud music service.

Any app on an iPhone or iPad can stream to Airplay (all sound effects/music sounds are redirected to Airplay). Whether or not the app has in-app control for switching it is another question, but IIRC both MOG and Spotify have in-app control over Airplay streaming.

If you're referring to the OS X app's unique ability to stream over Airplay (instead of relying on a third party solution like Airfoil that you'd need for Spotify), that's still an exclusive as far as I know.

Oh my, they brought it back. We'll update that. For a long time, they blocked it.

I just spoke to someone from Spotify on Sunday, and it was still the case then that you couldn't create an account without connecting it to Facebook. It's a very recent change (back) on their part. I've updated the article to reflect that. Thanks for pointing it out!

Don't really listen to music, much less pay for it, anymore. Nowadays if I'm working around the house, yard, or garage, I stream NPR radio programs, The Naked Scientists, Car Talk, or other dialog related podcasts.

Not trying to flame, but is this really relevant to a post relating to streaming music recommendations? Obviously everyone has their own preferences and if yours don't include music, then that's fine, but it doesn't seem terribly helpful.

No problem and no offense taken. It might be noted by example however that in an election where there are really only two major candidates, 'none of the above' or a write in candidate is still a valid option. It might be a voice not thought to be relevant in the conversation by some, but it's a voice none the less.

Long time Rdio user, trying out the spotify premium trial and I do like the desktop app better. Thought I would like the social integration more than I do, there's really only half a dozen FB friends who consistently show up in my stream - one of them annoyingly plays his own band 24/7 which floods my stream. Desktop app is nice in Spotify though, easier and quicker to find music - though I like Rdios "most played" album feature over Spotify's "top songs"

I think I'm going to stick with Rdio because while it would be nice to have more friends to find music off of Spotify's mobile app SUCKS. First off - there is no landscape mode. Really? It's 2012 and I can't use Spotify in my car dock without an annoying 3rd party landscape-force app which scrunch everything, especially the album art. The navigation and interface is well behind Rdio IMO, though it does seem to do a better job with playing music quickly, especially on 3G connections. But all-in-all their mobile apps needs serious work.

I just spoke to someone from Spotify on Sunday, and it was still the case then that you couldn't create an account without connecting it to Facebook. It's a very recent change (back) on their part. I've updated the article to reflect that. Thanks for pointing it out!

It's been possible to sign up without Facebook since at least September. I mentioned it in your dueling piece with Megan a while ago.

I'm now an XBox music pass kinda guy. The ability to download and keep the music on my phone and then have it on my home entertainment when I need it is great and it's a little bit cheaper than the other services right now.

I supplement this with new acts on www.thesixtyone.com and Grooveshark for premade playlists when I'm feeling lazy and want to discover something new.

Since the latter two services I ended up abandoning my spotify and last.fm subs. There is so much you can get for free, and now to download with the XB-Pass, that I just don't need these other services.

Does last.fm actually have any music on it? Every time I've searched for something on there it's had an entry for the artist, but no actual music.

Erm... they have at least as much music as Pandora, maybe more.

They work similar to Pandora, so you basically pick an artist/genre as a station and it will start streaming.

I used to love Pandora, but I'm not in the US, so it takes at least an hour to find a proxy that'll stream it and my patience is usually wearing pretty thin by then. I've not used it for years so I don't know what it's like now.

I've never used Last.fm like Pandora. Usually it comes up in any Google search for an artist, but when I go to the site it's just a bit of bio and no music. Occasionally there's one or two tunes but even then they're often cut off.

Don't really listen to music, much less pay for it, anymore. Nowadays if I'm working around the house, yard, or garage, I stream NPR radio programs, The Naked Scientists, Car Talk, or other dialog related podcasts.

Not trying to flame, but is this really relevant to a post relating to streaming music recommendations? Obviously everyone has their own preferences and if yours don't include music, then that's fine, but it doesn't seem terribly helpful.

No problem and no offense taken. It might be noted by example however that in an election where there are really only two major candidates, 'none of the above' or a write in candidate is still a valid option. It might be a voice not thought to be relevant in the conversation by some, but it's a voice none the less.

True enough, but those votes typically correspond either to a view that favors a less-well-known candidate or a different ideology. Most of them would not correspond to someone saying "I don't need a government at all."